What I kind of missed on the discussion was the reference of all languages that would be considered managed but actually compile to native code, like Delphi, Modula-3, Ada, Haskell, Ocaml, just to cite a few examples.

Maybe we could get some videos in "going native" that talk about these type of languages, which blend programmer productivity with native code generation.

It is nice to see Microsoft noticing that C++ still plays a major role in today's computing, but for me it still fails short.

The adherence to standard seems to be only to the features that Microsoft needs to write certain types of libraries, not with the language itself. Would have you improved your support if it wasn't for the new driving factors that are making C++ relevant again?

As for C99, it feels like an excuse. You mentioned gcc, but the truth is that Microsoft is the only vendor that supports 0 features from C99: